


mad girl's love song

by LunaOpheliac



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Acceptance, F/F, Grimdark, Hurt/Comfort, Ladystuck, Ladystuck 2014, Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 04:13:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3160763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaOpheliac/pseuds/LunaOpheliac
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tale of monstrous girls in love. Featuring: alien language barriers and the problems of assumption.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mad girl's love song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ymirjotunn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ymirjotunn/gifts).



> https://soundcloud.com/carolannemcgowan/mad-girls-love-song
> 
> Prompt:  
> "hop on back to when rose was still grimdark. now pretend kanaya and rose had met when that was still a thing. now consider: rose being consumed by grimdark forces, potential body horror and tons of monstrous events and activities; everyone around her believes she's only a vessel now for the alien beings of pure evil of the Furthest Ring and they can't help but avoid her, even when she's not having an episode. kanaya does not avoid her. kanaya never avoids her. talk dirty to me (or perfectly clean, i'm not partial either way) about hurt/comfort and grimdark possession and body horror and loving someone despite fearing them."

Rose had always talked a lot. She still did.

Kanaya liked to watch her, words spilling out on black-inked pages. Kanaya always cleaned up her mess.

Rose was writing even more than before, pages and pages of densely packed lines in tiny handwriting. Sometimes she needed Kanaya to hold her pen, or her arm. Sometimes Kanaya didn't understand what Rose was writing. Sometimes she did, and she didn't know what to do.

Kanaya still knew much less about what was going on with Rose than she'd like. In any case, she couldn't relate. Rose was blacked out, and not just on those occasions where she fainted.

Kanaya was steadily growing to become Rose's constant companion. Not that she felt very equipped to do that, in the start. Rose had been the chronicler of the session, that much was obvious to Kanaya – with her knowledge and her Derse dreams, but Kanaya wasn't like that. Kanaya was a mother and a seamstress – what she collected wasn't knowledge, like her lover. It was feelings, it was people. And maybe that was for the best.

Kanaya watched the people on the meteor, too, whether she was sitting with Rose or sewing for herself. Watched their relationships, the tapestry of red and black and ashen and pale that she used to spend too much time weaving herself. One day, she realized, someone was going to rip it up again. She wasn't sure who. She just hoped it wasn't going to be Rose.

Kanaya didn't really want to admit that sometimes, too, Rose scared her. Spent enough time, she figured, dissuading others from fearing her – learning her tongue and translating for others, convincing her friends that Rose wasn't speaking _evil,_ she was really just struggling to _speak_.

In Rose's more lucid periods, she could write things on a whiteboard and talk like that. Kanaya knew she was getting out of the habit of communicating in English, though. Kanaya suspected that the alien tongues running over and over in her lover's mind came more naturally to her. Figured it might be a Derse dreamer thing – the main thing that Kanaya was deeply unfamiliar with.

 

* * *

 

The dreambubbles barely helped.

Kanaya sought out Porrim. Sought out the pre-scratch Serket, even. Found nothing. Nothing but a reflection of the kinds of women she would love, she thought. The women who liked to destroy themselves. The women she might become, too.

...right?

 

* * *

Kanaya didn't really think the others _wanted_ to avoid Rose. But there did seem to be a certain logic to it. Even when Rose was stable, when she wasn't vomiting up words and meaningless (meaningless?), prophecies like she did, she was strange – in a really not very deliberate way, it seemed. Rose had been a bit affected before – Derse dreamer facade all over, saturating her actual personality as well. This state she was in made her seem one-tracked, almost. Kanaya knew that Rose did pay attention to the world around her, as much as any of them did – but it was apparently an easy mistake to make.

Really, they didn't know how to talk to her. Her brother seemed to try. And fail. Retreating was instinctive when she was talking apparent nonsense. That applied to Kanaya, too, if she were to be completely honest.

And of course it was harder for Dave, it had to be – he was used to his sister, his friend, being a certain way-

And Kanaya knew he knew what it was like to be strange, but he probably didn't know what it was like to be repulsive. Un-cope-with-able.

She always reminded herself that they were all freaks of their worlds, though. Maybe they had to be, to be able to cope with the overwhelming destruction and overwhelming knowledge brought on by any Sburb session.

Anything could be a survival technique, after all.

 

* * *

 

GA: Dave Am I Correct In My Belief That You Were A Derse Dreamer

TG: yeah

TG: why

GA: I Think That What Happened With Rose May Have To Do With Derse

GA: I Want To Know If You Ever Experienced Anything Similar

-turntechGodhead [TG] is now idle-

 

* * *

 

Dave was preoccupied with Terezi and Karkat was preoccupied with Gamzee (' _of all people_ _'_ , because sometimes Kanaya just _seethe_ _d_ ), and Kanaya took care of her lover alone.

 

* * *

 

To a troll outsider, they might look like moirails.

Rose was the dangerous one, of course. The one Kanaya had to placate with a shoosh and a pap and a reassurance. A false one, perhaps. Moirallegiance, like a chain, because how could Kanaya actually _desire_ a monster girl, couldn't be matesprits with a girl so like herself in those ways, people would be repulsed by their little display, a rainbow drinker and a demon prophet-

...wrong.

 

“Would you like some coffee, Rose?”

Kanaya knew how to be a mother, pursed lips and burning heart -

“rash'afaewhaklabl, whaknl bthu iloj...”

Rose's litany wrecked Kanaya when they lay together. She never knew how to deal with that.

It was always too easy for people to presume that Rose was saying nothing. Just another thing Kanaya had to seethe about.

Her Rose was saying everything.

Kanaya didn't know if Rose was really trapped, still. Or if perhaps she had sought this out, this way of being. She had been fascinated by the terrors, after all. But why would anyone _choose_ a way of being so divorced from both humanity and trollkind?

 

...Then again, Kanaya had always thrived in the light, hadn't she?

 

* * *

 

Kanaya kept speculating about the world they might be on track to win. Maybe even all of them.

And maybe Rose wouldn't be the way she was anymore, in a world without Sburb. Maybe she would be her old self. The one Kanaya never really knew.

But Kanaya liked to imagine it like this. It was her own little scenario. She wasn't sure anyone else would find it as endearing as she did.

Kanaya (maybe even with wings!) and a tastefully decorated (insects and tentacles!) hive, and her Rose. Her Rose, dark and shining bright and free. With their own language, and their own identity. For once.

 

* * *

 

(They won, of course. Rose and Kanaya and Dave and Terezi and Karkat and all the others.

And maybe, Kanaya thought, they were finally on track to _existing_ , an existence unadulterated by the shame ever so inherent to their little group. Inherent to what they all were: the monsters of Earth and the monsters of Alternia.

At least, she certainly hoped so.)

 


End file.
